O. Fournier Winery

Occasion: Wine tour lunch
Location: O. Fournier winery in Mendoza (ofournier.com)
Edibles: crispy pastry over caper cream; sliced, deep-fried eggplant with croutons and a tomato sauce; choice of lemon risotto with ginger and cherry tomatoes or steak with blue cheese; orange sorbet and a molten chocolate cake with coffee ice-cream and almond foam for dessert; and, of course, a selection of O. Fournier's wines to pair

Musings: After touring the Salentein and Andeluna wineries, the finale of our Ampora wine tour was lunch at O. Fournier. O. Fournier is a modern and high tech winery, but its owners also place a high premium on aesthetics: the main building (first picture) has won awards for its architecture, and the dining room (pictured above) was designed to offer a stunning panorama while you eat.

The lunch we had was extravagant and absolutely up to the high standards of the winery and the surroundings! While the style of the food was a little gimicky and molecular-gastronomic for my taste, I greatly enjoyed the lunch and we were all completely stuffed when we were done.

You could really tell that the head chef (who I believe is the owner's wife) was intellectually curious about food and prepared everything that came out of the kitchen with love and care. Our tour guide Myfanwy (Welsh, pronounced mee-van-wee - it gave me problems all day) asked for a simple salad instead of the offered mains and got an artistically-arranged, colorful plate of veggies with all manner of flourishes and garnishes.

I must point out that the steak was the superior main course option, as evidenced by the fact that the steak-eaters (myself included, naturally) trounced the risotto-eaters in cleaning their plates!